Catholics have a hard teaching on divorce and remarriage—hard for the married to live by and lately, it seems, hard for the bishops to uphold. In its teaching on marriage, the Church merely follows Christ, who said that a man who puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery. Many things, perhaps, can be said against Christ’s view of marriage; one thing that can be said for it is that it applies equally to rich and poor. It recognizes no distinction between the laborer who ruts the village whore and the king who brazens his way with pomps and ceremonies and all the justifications that canonists can provide. Following Christ, the Church has recognized that rich and poor sin alike—though only the rich have the means to make their sin respectable.

If the bishops advocating for a more accommodating approach to the divorced and remarried at the Vatican’s Synod on the Family have their way, this will soon change. While the details of their proposals have varied, the basic thrust has not. If done with sufficient “stability”—that is, if the couple stays together, has children, and gets involved in the community—adultery can be looked at in a more positive light. Achieving these things requires time, money, and social support. For those who live in conditions of precarity, they are very nearly impossible.

Read the article “Country Club Catholicism and the Synod on the Family” on firstthings.com.